The Revolutionary Socialist Network, Workers
Capitalism completely destroys nature by prioritizing the benefit of the market
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- Capitalism is not sustainable (Generally)
Capitalism completely destroys nature by prioritizing the benefit of the marketLeff 21 Leff, Deconstructing Capital and Territorializing Life, Enrique, Professor of Political Ecology at UNAM, pg 181 - IShone The capitalist mode of production exploits Nature to the beneft of the market and the extraction of surplus value, by disposing of the potentials of Nature and human beings as objects for economic expropriation. However, despite capital’s legacy of destruction and degradation on Nature, it has not yet annihilated the self-organizing and productive processes emerging from natural sources of life nor the existential resistance and cultural creativity from the peoples of the Earth. the productive forces of Nature and the ecological organization of the biosphere, under the dominance of the destructive forces of capital, lie there as a potential reserve waiting to be endowed, embodied and embedded by new productive rationality. If throughout history men have survived through diverse modes of appropriation/ transformation of Nature; if capitalism imposed its accumulative logic as a mode of expropriation/ degradation of Nature; after the environmental crisis a new era has opened up in the evolution of life in the planet for the social endowment of Nature: a mode of extracting matter and energy, of enacting and transforming the metabolism of the biosphere, respecting the conditions of life in the planet. Endowing Nature will imply en-knowing Nature: learning to live within the conditions and inhabiting Nature in the immanence of life on Earth. That will be a turning point in history opening the horizons of sustainable, meaningful life on this planet. Capitalism is not sustainable (Generally)Korten ’16 [David; August 10; founder and president of the Living Economies Forum; David Korten, “The New Economy: A Living Earth System Model,” https://davidkorten.org/new-economy-system-model/] SPark We have now returned to the historical norm by which the ruling class and the top ranks of the retainer class appropriate virtually all the economic surplus beyond subsistence for their private benefit. The rest of society struggles to survive under whatever conditions of wage and debt slavery the ruling class offers. Unfortunately, what the favored classes consume as the system’s economic “surplus” is not a true surplus if it depends on drawing down the generative capacity of living Earth’s natural capital and its ability to support life. According to the Global Footprint Network, human consumption exceeded in the early 1970s the limits of what Earth could sustain and has since depended on depleting natural capital. The promise of all the world’s people enjoying a U.S. or European style of material affluence, with sufficient economic growth, is a deception. Awareness of this is spreading, as is the sense that the current system is unsustainable. For many of us this does not come as news. But it is only beginning to penetrate the broader public consciousness. The essential transformation of our unjust, destructive, and grotesquely wasteful institutional system depends on bridging the divisions that have for so long kept the many, who seek a world of peace and justice for all, divided against one another. The communications revolution, which has stripped away the physical barriers to our ability to join in common cause as a global community, holds the critical key to our ability to now navigate the transition to a new human era defined by the three core goals set forth at the beginning of this report: -ecosystem health and balance, -shared Prosperity, and -living Democracy. Download 2.09 Mb. Share with your friends:
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